Is Romanian the Most Difficult Romance Language?
I always found very interesting that the ordinary people do not care about moot points that the academics love so much. The fact is that past tense is widely used in Wallachia"
Let's say that in the wallachian variant of Romanian the past tense is still used- That's all
I would say Yes. For me anyways, I have taken both Italian and Spanish in school and have found both fairly easy. I decided I wanted to learn a more challenging language such as an Eastern European language. Slavic languages seemed so difficult, so I went with Romanian. I love the language but for me I struggled with this one the most.
However Spanish, Italian, & Portuguese are all somewhat similar, whereas Romanian is like the outcast of the group. Maybe that's why it seems to be the most difficult romance language.
I have taken both Italian and Spanish in school and have found both fairly easy.
I'm sure you can use the subjunctive mood pretty well, like most native speakers of English IoI
Only people with IQ 150 or above can use Spanish subjunctive properly.
Continental Portuguese is probably the most complicated romance language
All I can say as a native Romanian speaker is that Romanian grammar is quite complicated. The academic speech style and the formal speech style are not very immediate to handle, although the common speech style is pretty straightforward. I think the best angles to attack the learning of this language proper are either to use some classes led by someone who knows the trade or to hang out with a native speaker. These approaches worked best for me, everything else failed.
I have no idea about the degree of difficulty of other languages other than English, French and Romanian.
Good luck.
If you already know Hungarian, Russian, German and at least a romance language, especially Italian, Romanian is a breeze.
I've always seen Romanian as a cross between the Romance and the Slavic group of languages. In the Romance group, it is most closely related to Latin and a bit more distantly to Italian.
Romanian is roughly to Romance languages what English is to Germanic languages. It is technically Romance, but it has large amounts of vocabulary of Slavic origin, like English while Germanic has a large Romance influence.
I agree with Baum that German, Hungarian and Russian are quite difficult to learn. Agglutinative character of both Russian and Hungarian gave me hard times and I gave up. As a side note, Russian was compulsory from 5th grade to 12th grade in that teaching system as well as French and I missed Russian entirely, although there were wonderful good teachers, in retrospect. I found Russian grammar difficult and I guess the cyrilic alphabet played its role as obstacle in addition to the lack of conversation. I wish to read Russian poetry and prose in original - they are absolutely wonderful. As Latins said traduttore traditore, I feel like something is missing in translation.
Q.E.D,Baum era ironic! A spus ca daca sti ungureste,germana,rusa si italiana poti sa spui ca sti sa vorbesti romaneste...
I read somewhere that for an english speaker, romanian is one of the easiest languages to learn. I wish I remembered where to post it...
On another note, as a native romanian speaker I dont see the relevance of the argument that romanian is influenced by slavic so much. I cannot understand almost nothing from any slavic languages be that russian , ucrainian, bulgarian etc. Everybody speaks about slavic influence but I have found nothing to support it.
<<I cannot understand almost nothing from any slavic languages be that russian , ucrainian, bulgarian etc. Everybody speaks about slavic influence but I have found nothing to support it.>>
I think the similarity lies in sounds, not meaning of words. Also, "dragoste," Romanian for love, has Slavic roots unlike the other Romance languages that have one form or another of the Latin "amor."
Random Slavic loanword finds in 2 minute search:
prieten
gospodina
morcov
raţă
cocoş
Meaning is exactly the same.